Category: Craft (Page 8 of 19)

The Essay Project: Stripping Down

March 19, 2021 / Big Bang Poetry

Louise Glück, the recent, much deserved recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is the author of the next essay in the David Rivard class packet. It's her “Disruption, Hesitation, Silence” essay and it’s very interesting that Rivard placed this essay after Tony Hoagland’s “Disproportion” essay because it takes an opposing stance (just like our previous essay did).

This isn’t one of my favorite Gluck essays. I loved both of her essay books American Originality and Proofs & Theories. But even back when was a young, egomaniacal little poet I wrote at the end of this essay TERRIBLE ESSAY (in all caps like that even).

Hubris, meet me.

Anyway, I can’t say I had a complete turnaround with this essay but it’s a good argument for inconclusion and brevity, stripping it back down, the opposite of all that extra bling and filler Hoagland (and vicariously I) were enjoying in his essay.

Glück is deprecating at first, admitting she has a “tendency to reject all ideas I didn’t think of first…[which] creates an obligation to articulate an argument.” Hey, it's almost as if she was arguing with Hoagland directly.

“I do not think that more information always makes a richer poem. I am attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent deliberate silence….to the power of ruins….wholeness is implied.”

She talks about Holbein’s drawings exhibited in an unfinished state and how they show the “power of the unfinished. All earthly experience is partial…”

She rejects the “cult of exhaustive detail” and finally declares she prefers “the suggested over the amplified.” This is a preference against flamboyance for subtlety. But unlike the previous essay we discussed, she doesn’t bank in terms like truth or authenticity. She doesn't make a character judgement in other words. This is a choice of craft, she says.

To show examples, she covers Rilke’s poem about the torso of Apollo and how Rilke is the “master of not saying.” She then covers Berryman’s Dream Songs,” the drama of which she says is “the absence of a firm self.” Then she moves to George Oppen and says she tries to read Berryman and Open side by side (interesting project idea).

“Oppen’s clean, austere, dynamic poetry has very few active verbs. No one uses the verb of being better.” And she talks about his silences and pauses. “..very little of the language is vivid….ideas are held in suspension….austerity and a distaste for blather.”

[mmmm….bather….sounds like buttah.]

Glück admits she has a “suspicion of closure” that is common for many post-modernists, who have the luxury of being suspicious of it, I might add. Certain experimental ideas in post-modernism have been labeled privileged and I think for good reason (although I do also like all those experiments). War-torn poets may yearn for closure in a way that middle- and upper-class poets can’t quite imagine. But this is a solid stance of poets of Glück's age and I don’t want to be dismissive of it either….it’s an offshoot of the challenge poet-modernism made to classic Academia and at that time it was very useful.

Glück talks about “the time it takes for information to be absorbed” as we read through a poem. I love this about Gluck, that she thinks this mental process through.

She talks about Oppen’s “characteristic move” of “the idea implied in being dismissed,” how he “defines things by saying what they are not….creation through eradication is, for me, congenial.”

For sure there is something frustratingly heartfelt in the unsaid-but-indicated thing, but I don’t know as I would go as far as to call it ‘congenial.’

“When poems are difficult, it is often because their silences are complicated, hard to follow. For me, the answer to such moments is not more language.”

This is an interesting position for a poet to take, for someone who's currency is language, but not very unlike her own poems. I just would insist again here that neither way is right or wrong, just strategies one prefers.

She calls the “dream of abundance” “all detail and no shape…’gratuitous.’”

She admits “withholding is currently suspect. It is associated with rigidity, miserliness, insufficiencies; with faculties either atrophied or checked. It is a habit not admired in personal interaction, in which realm it is associated with ideas of manipulation, slyness, coldness; it is considered uniformly dangerous in governments, and so on.”

It's hard to argue with any of that, even in our favorite poets. These attributes are human ones, of personal choice. Some miserly, atrophied, manipulative, cold poets are quite good (as the reading goes).

But none of this proves being flamboyant, effusive, forthright, loose and over-explain-y is wrong in any way.

Glück believes the tension “promotes depth” as it is “distilled.”

Now for me, the bang for the buck in this essay comes in her explication of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” which is really brilliant. She says,

[The poem] “is a poem of pathological delay. The action of the poem is inaction. “Let us go, then, you and I…” But Prufrock puts off starting….nothing in fact, occurs; nothing is ever begun.”

Finally, I get this poem. Thank you Louise Glück.

“The future is impossible, the past lost. And the present a vacuum: non-action….The poem is all wringing of hands…the masterpiece of avoidance. At the poem’s center is the unsaid…”

Since I searched Google a few days ago for Glück, my news page has been posting links to recent articles about her, including these interesting things:

The Soul-Excavating Work of Louise Glück on Lit Hub

and Mourning, Reimagined: The Misunderstood Poetics of Louise Glück on The Harvard Crimson

Creepy Google. But thanks.

The Essay Project: Truth and Character

March 15, 2021 / Big Bang Poetry

Back to the essays from Suzanne Gardiner’s Sarah Lawrence class.

This new essay from my stack is a good example of how non-literary essays can be particularly good essays for poets. In our Essay class, a student pulled this essay "For the Artist Everything in Nature is Beautiful" from “Art: Conversations with Paul Gsell” by Auguste Rodin Originally published 1984.

Art essays are always great poetry essays. I have stacks of art books that have taught me invaluable lessons about creativity and how other artists think, the similar struggles they've gone through, how they solve problems with their projects. So don’t pass up those thrift art books that look interesting to you.

And this is a pretty important essay as they go, so timely as it follows Tony Hoagland’s "Disproportion" (which I ravenously agreed with two week ago). This essay is the other argument, the argument we’ve been hearing for the last 4 decades (or maybe longer, since the Romantic poets).

This particular conversation compares a Rodin sculpture to a a François Villon poem that inspired it, both depictions of the ravages of age.

[By the way, while I was in Cleveland a few months ago my parents had me watch the first two seasons of The Kominsky Method, also a depiction of the ravages of age].

The Villon poem talks about shrunken breasts and sausage-speckled skin and the “dream and desire” for “eternal beauty” and finding beauty in unlikely places. Gsell maintains the Rodin’s sculpture is possibly superior, more fearful of a depiction (being so visual).

“What one calls ‘ugly’ in Nature can become great beauty in art…When a great artist, or a great writer gets hold of one of these types of ‘ugliness,’ he instantly transfigures it. With a wave of his magic wand, he transforms it into beauty; this is alchemy, this is like a fairy tale.”

This is actually an idea going back to the Romantic poets elevating so-called common topics, an idea rising to a groundswell in the artist archetype we live by today. And it's a swell idea. It’s a good thing. It can be like a fairy tale.

The problem is this idea has become a cynical pose devoid of the authenticity it claims to represent. And here is where the whole idea of authenticity, truth and character starts to falter.

“The reason is that in Art, beauty exists only in that which has ‘character.’ ‘Character’ is the intense truth of any natural spectacle, beautiful or ugly. …the soul, the feeling…The ugly in Art is that which is false, that which is artificial, that which seeks to be pretty or beautiful, instead of being expressive; that which is affected and precious; that which smiles without motive; that which is pretentious without reason; the person who throws out his chest and swaggers without cause; all that is without soul and truth; all that is only a parade of beauty and grace; all that lies.”

There are many ways to be in this world, so many ways to express one's 'soul' and every communication (be it a painting, sculpture, poem, short story whatever) requires both its lies and its truths and these words 'character' words have become vague and insincere at best and stale, ugly lies at worst. These words have become establishment code for who's included or excluded as a 'serious' artist. It's fundamentally untrue.

Plus those words just can’t break through the wall of post-modernism with its deftness and exposing fake truths. If truths have turned fake then what can we say about the truths found in artifice?

I explain it like this: there’s a very good reason why a gay man (for example, or member of any other disenfranchised group) might be attracted to artifice and 'over-the-top' kitsch and big display. Why would that be? What do these ideas offer for longtime disenfranchised, excluded artist?

What does the idea of authenticity have for someone living a life that demands they hid their true selves? Not much. If you can't be your authentic self for one reason or another, if society's definition of authenticity itself excludes you, why cater to its limitations?

This essay has had its day.

The next essay will be another argument against the flair proposed by Tony Hoagland's essay on "Disproportion," this time by Louise Glück and it's an essay I find to be a much better (modern) argument against the frills of bling.

The Essay Project: Sparkle and Excess

March 5, 2021 / Big Bang Poetry

I didn't recognize this essay at first. It's another one from David Rivard's class set called “On Disproportion” by Tony Hoagland. I’m predispositioned to like Hoagland. He’s very funny. And this essay is from one of my favorite books, his Real Sofistikashun: Essays on Poetry and Craft.

He divides the world of poems into “two large camps”

(1) “the conservative, well-wrought, shapely poem” and

(2) “the deformed, admirably lopsided, zany, and subversive one.”

“Any good poem," he says, "tames the savage or savages the tame to some degree.” Balance. I like it. He talks about how good poems should hold “certain opposing energies” and defines “disproportion” as a “conscious indulgence in stylistic effects…indulgences of the unconscious impulses…..even when such indulgences distort the ‘packaging’ of the poem.”

[Because I’m also Cher Scholar I might call this the Cherness in a poem.]

Hoagland first looks at the straight-laced poems of Horace who “harmonizes and subordinates parts to a whole” and who believes “the middle way is best.” Another example he uses is William Carlos Williams’ poem “Pastoral,” a poem which he says has an “appealing plainness….directness that seems open and American.” Horace poems, he says, are “didactic in…intention and argumentative in its structure…architectural and conservative…symmetrical and lucid.”

Hoagland uses Oscar Wilde as a comparison, a poet who contends “what art really reveals to us in nature’s lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition….If nature had been comfortable, man never would have invented architecture…” He's so funny.

Hoagland contends that Wilde was more “frank than most artists about the ego drive that lurks beneath making, and the need to make the ego feel safe. The goal, as he presents it, is a sense of mastery.” Hoagland points out our internalized “biases when we say a poem should be ‘economical’ and ‘efficient'…"applying commercial terminology to art.”

I would also ague that we misread "authenticity" as this same kind of economy. “Control exacts a cost too: It is often achieved at the expense of discovery and spontaneity,” Hoagland says.

He then covers a few poems of Wallace Stevens, “the first poet in whose work [Hoagland] recognized elements of style as deliberately excessive….[with elements of] playfulness rather than loftiness.”

Hoagland appreciates the way these poems are “elastic in form instead of architectural, more like a Sinkly than a Grecian urn with” their “willingness to gallop off…allowing language to balloon into clause upon clause….experience…not really interested in organizing…excess instead of wisdom….opulence instead of utility…sometimes far-reaching heartiness….the human value of flamboyance.”

As a Cher fan, of course I’m inclined to agree with all of this.

It's not “mere style,” Hoagland says. But then he wonders if style can even compete with “autobiography crowd[ing] the pages of literary magazines, proclaiming the virtue of the raw, the mimetic, and the experiential.” Alas, this is a Rolling Stone music critic too!

Hoagland admits this thing “uneconomical—the marriage of a lot of fancy words to a little bit of situation…linguistic vaudeville…” combined with sobriety can create “a boozy eloquence and then into a serious invocation.” He maintains “our ability to change direction in an artwork is greater than we commonly suppose….comedy and pathos coexist.”

He quotes the Denis Johson poem “It’s Thursday: Your Exam Was Tuesday” to say “The most literal-minded of readers might charge that the poet wastes twelve lines to say nothing more than that ‘the moon came up.’”

The ultimate disproportion poem cited is “Cities” by Susan Mitchell and Hoagland refers, as I have above, to rock music’s terms: “feedback occurs when a guitarist moves his instrument too close to its amplifier—an ugly screeching burning sound is the result…often produced deliberately” and this equates with Mitchell’s “pure voluptuousness of sound."

Hoagland says we seek control “economy and proportion. We discard such insubordinate language because it doesn’t match the rest of the furniture in the house, because we aren’t supposed to allow an elephant in the living room: It makes ownership unclear.”

He then covers Tess Gallagher poems, “disorder maps". This poet, he says, is "seized by the muse (the medieval called it the furor poetica) and carried away.” He says we should see this as “not only an ecstatic ‘giving in’….but as a rebellion against the predictable development of more generic poems….Excesses, this essay argues, are good. In capable hands, they demonstrate freedom, give pleasure, celebrate artifice, react against convention, and illustrate the healthy, complex earthiness of the maker.”

The Essay Project: Dull Subjects

February 25, 2021 / Big Bang Poetry

Since I was in Cleveland for a spell, instead of lugging there all my remaining essays from the Suzanne Gardiner Sarah Lawrence Essay class, I packed instead a bound book of essays from David Rivard’s class. Rivard was a visiting teacher while I was there and his poetry workshop included lots of rigor and readings (which is why that class was my favorite workshop at SLC). Anyway, since I was a young shit back then (grown-up from being a little shit), I didn’t find much to agree with in Rivard’s essays at the time. But looking back I like these essays much more than the ones from the students in the essay class. Oh, the happy surprises of maturity.

Anyway, this bound book of photocopies is a marvel in and of itself, back when the days teachers could make them, before copyright nailed their beleaguered asses to the overpriced textbook wall. I’ll be keeping this Rivard volume long after I throw all the other essays away. It has bootleg cred now.

The first essay in the collection is “Dull Subjects” by William Mathews. You can find a copy on JSTOR if you have a subscription or are a student: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40375714?seq=1

The jist of the essay is about how dull subjects can be transformed into amazing poems when handled with craft. He starts with a quote by Robert Creeley after someone once asked him after a poetry reading, “Are those real poems or did you make them up yourself?”

Oy. Mathews talks about the process of writing and how it helps us discover and transform ostensibly dull subjects. The essays starts ethereally by mentions of “ex-pressing” and making matter malleable and what the raw material "is" but then a “subject matter is chosen” and how pointless the subject matter really is. Consider, he says, trying to use an Index by Subject to find a poem.

(I actually find those moderately useful sometimes…”what was that poem about eggs that mystery guy once wrote?”).

Anyway, Mathews claims there are only four kinds of poems and maybe he’s right about that:

“I went out into the woods today and it made me feel, you know, sort of religious.
We’re not getting any younger.
It sure is cold and lonely (a) without you, honey, or (2) with you, honey.
Sadness seems but the other side of the coin of happiness, and visa versa, and in any case the coin is too soon spend and on we know not what.”

That’s probably all you need to say in a poetry essay right there. But Matthews goes on to talk about the “ur-plot” for poems, kind of like an elevator pitch for movies and then he says even grammar has a plot: sentences open and they close, one line precedes another with “considerations of time and rhythm, which is to say narrative and suspense.”

Brilliant.

He then talks about “how provisional ostensible subject matter is” with examples from Wallace Stevens. He talks about the poem “Harmonium” and the mathematical nature of the first few lines. “Subject matter," he says, "…is often in poetry a place to begin.” He then talks about William Carlos Williams’ poem “Spring and All.” Poems about perception.

“It’s not only that dull or modest, or unassuming subjects provide a useful place to being, or that they can be in themselves a constraint against melodrama and easy grandeur….but may well…incite a poet’s suspicion of the perfected certainties or art in the face of a life—not the poet’s, necessarily, but anyone’s—that is unruly, unfinished, and unstoppable.”

He then talks about Howard Moss’s poem “The Summer Thunder” which seemed so apropos after January 6, 2021. I couldn't find it online, so I transcribed it at the time:

“The Summer Thunder” by Howard Moss

Now the equivocal lightning flashes
Come to close for comfort and the thunder
Sends the trembling dog under the table,
I long for the voice that is never shaken.

Above the sideboard, representation
Takes its last stand: a small rectangle
Of oak trees dripping with painted greenness,
And in the foreground, a girl asleep

In a field who speaks for a different summer
From the one the thunder is mulling over—
How calm the sensuous is! How saintly!
Undersea light from the lit-up glen

Lends a perspective to an arranged enchantment,
As peaceful as a Renaissance courtyard
Opened for tourists centuries after
Knights have bloodied themselves with doctrine.

Matthews says “syntactical discontent” causes “shifting barometric pressure.” He ends the essay with this:

“It is not, of course, the subject that is or isn’t dull, but the quality of attention we do or do not pay to it….Dull subjects are those we have failed.”

Amen.

The Essay Project: Writing Mysticism

January 8, 2021 / Big Bang Poetry

Happy New Year all. I’ve lost some time here since mid November. First the election drama in the U.S. which is ongoing, with the Confederate party having decided to abandon democracy and the union. On top of that, both of my 84-year old parents caught covid-19 in Ohio the week after the election. We came screechingly close to losing them both. It was a horrifying experience including my mother’s dystopian descriptions of the covid ward at the normally excellent Cleveland hospital. This after a year of hearing members of my extended family rail against any kind of covid restrictions so they could be free. I’m a different person on this side of things. The ramifications of this are still to be seen.

Anyway, back to work, including this project.

"Toward an Open Universe" by Robert Duncan (1982) (Find the book)

I started reading this essay before all the shit started. Much of it was incomprehensible to me on the first read, punctuated with Duncan’s own poems as examples. (How generous of him.)

It's an essay about rhythm, the “tide-flow under the sun and moon of the sea, systole and diastole of the heart, these rhythms lie deep in our experience” and the breaking rhyme, “swell and ebb/rise and fall” of lines of poetry. Okay, I’m with you so far. But then we get into “personal and cosmic identity” and Schrödinger and Oedipus and “psychic life.” “Each poet seeks to commune with creation, with the divine world.” “We work toward the Truth of things.”

Nice ideas, but I’m skeptical.

He even admits: “this is a heroic and dramatic gesture and may obscure what I would get at.” Yes. Yes it is.

His poetry snippet to match (spaces intentional):

( obscurity. Flaring into a surf

upon an answering obscurity. )

That kind of gauzy vagueness was fun for a few decades but now it’s not wordplay anymore, it’s politics. And if you indulge in it it, you sound like a self-involved narcissist. And also probably a privileged jackoff with too much time on your hands. (And I say that from a place of privilege with enough time on my hands to write this blog post).

“It is not that poetry imitates but that poetry enacts in its order the order of first things, as just here in this consciousness, they may exist, and the poet desires to penetrate the seeming of style and subject matter to the most real where there is no form that is not content, no content that is not form.”

Sigh. My head hurts. I do understand a statement like this: “dance and poetry emerge as ways of knowing.” They are ways of knowing. It’s the "emergence" I’m hung up on. And the capitalized generic nouns.

“To answer that call, to become the poet, means to be aware of creation, creature, and creator coinherit in the one event. There is not only the immanence of God, His indwelling, but there is also the imminence of God, His impending occurrence. In the expectancy of the poem, grief and fear seem necessary to the revelation of Beauty…

To be alive itself is a form involving organization in time and space, continuity and body, that exceeds clearly our conscious design. ‘It is by avoiding the rapid decay into the inert state of “equilibrium” that an organism appears so enigmatic,” Schrödinger writes…

“Becoming conscious, becoming aware of the order of what is happing is the full responsibility of the poet.”

These absolutes about what poetry is and what a poet should be are always so narrow.

“All deep things are Song. It seems somehow the very central essence of us, Song;”

“Poetry, therefore, we will call musical thought. The Poet is he who thinks in that manner. See deep enough, and you see musically; the heart of Nature being everywhere music, if you can only reach it.”

This reminds me of a poet named Greta at Sarah Lawrence whose poems Jean Valentine coarsely said were completely without music. I don’t for a minute think this is because Greta failed to think deeply.

But Duncan finds me again when he says “This music of men’s speech…is clearly related to that beauty of mathematics….

He talks about more about Schrödinger and disequilibrium and how decay is part of moving to a state of equilibrium, that life is an evasion of equilibrium.

“Our engagement with knowing…our demand for truth is not to reach a conclusion but to keep our exposure to what we do not know.” This is good. This is important.

It’s about how striving is more important than arriving. He then quotes Charles Olson’s breath and line ideas.

This essay packed came from my Sarah Lawrence essay class and it also contained another essay, “The Experience of Poetry in the Scientific Age” (1966) by May Swenson.

Similar to the Duncan, Swenson’s piece is semi-metaphysical if that's even the right word. And this is okay. You just have to be in the mood for it. I'm not always in the mood for it. The Duncan essay really annoyed me the first read. The second read it was much more palatable.

“What is the experience of poetry?" Swenson asks, "…a craving to get through the curtains of things as they appear, to things as they are, and then into the larger, wilder space of things as they are becoming”

She quotes W.B. Yeats as saying poetry is “the thinking of the body.”

Well, I guess it is and it isn’t. I don’t feel T.S. Eliot did much thinking particularly outside of his head.

“The poetic experience…is one of constant curiosity, skepticism, and testing—astonishment, disillusionment, renewed discovery, re-illumination. It amounts to a virtual compulsion to probe with the senses into the complex actuality of all things, outside and inside the self, and to determine relationships between them.”

She compares and contrasts the impulses of the scientist and the poet and thinking into possibility, the poetic method and the scientific method. This essay is way before the 1969 moon landing so it references the possibility of that as if it were in the future.

She, too, uses her own poems as examples. She says, “Science and poetry are alike, or allied, it seems to me, in their largest and main target—to investigate any and all phenomena of existence beyond the flat surface of appearances.”

The she asks, “How is it that with our own minds we can explore our own minds.” She actually has an interesting poem about that she shows called “The Universe.”

But prescriptive “should” paragraphs like this wear on my soul:

“The poet’s universe had better be centered within the present: it had better not install itself (and stall itself) in anachronisms either conceptual or expressionistic. Because the poet, I believe, should be in the vanguard of his time. He can, in his unique way, be a synthesizer and synchronizer of the many components and elements of a great new pattern emergent in the investigations of biologists, psychologists, anthropologists, astronomers, physicists, et al."

By the way, when should a writer give up on a list and finish with an et al?

She finishes with “Poetry can help man stay human.”

Other than metaphorically, scientifically speaking…what other choice do we have?

The Essay Project: Reading Poems

November 10, 2020 / Big Bang Poetry

This week's essay is Marvin Bell’s “The ‘Technique’ of Re-Reading.” You can find an edited version here: https://poets.org/text/technique-rereading

This is an essay about reading poems to get you better at writing poems.

Speaking for myself, I did okay without reading poems at first, but when I started reading poems I started having transformations and epiphanies. So there you go.

And much of the time in the beginning I had to let go of understanding everything I read (in poems and essays). In fact there are still poems and essays (including parts of this one) where I have trouble understanding everything.

Here Bell starts by talking about the superstitious tricks of writing (like having a favorite pen). He then goes into re-reading as a way to learn the tricks of language. A first reading generally tells you what it says. A re-reading tells you how it says it. This is a way, Bell says, to educate yourself in the absence of teachers.

He then talks about his experience re-reading Richard Wilbur’s “The Writer” with its extended metaphor and similes.

Bells hints at but talks too briefly about American poetry and rhetoric vs. image, metaphor, tone, voice, imagination, structure and vision. I didn’t come away with much I could hold on to there. But I did understand this…

“It is harder, much much harder, to learn from poems which skip that rhetorical level, and which present themselves as associational texts in which the reasoning is in between the lines, while the lines themselves present only the emblems of experience and, sometimes, of epiphany.”

He then talks about James Wright’s “To the Saguaro Cactus Tree in the Desert Rain” as an example of a poem listening to itself. Not completely sure what that means.

He then goes into the history of James Wright’s writing choices from formalism to prose poetry and his particular poetic structure.

He talks about translations that take liberties with literal accuracy and “exaggerate the spirit of the poem” and brings up Robert Bly’s translation of Tomas Tranströmer’s “After a Death” about the death of John F. Kennedy, although the poem never specifically states that fact.

Bell compares American verse with international poetry in an interesting way:

“Perhaps we favor particulars in part because our choice has long seemed to lie exclusively between specifics and explanation. For important reasons, we favor the concrete over the abstract, the particular over the general, presentation over explanation, showing over telling. Yet so much poetry from other cultures exhibits both the tensile strength of the particular and the active force of the general.”

He talks about the fear of the sentimental.

“The beginning of the final stanza of this poem reminds me of the distance between our poets and many of our critics. Few of our critics would care for a line like, "It is still beautiful to feel the heart beat." Half of our poets and most of our critics write as if they believe that, since life ends in death, we are essentially dead. Hence, they believe, sometimes without knowing it, that any uncomplicated emotion about life is excessive: therefore, sentimental. But poetry, because it is written by the living to be read by the living, is a way of life. It is always about living, even in the shadow of death…I find this quality in poetry from other countries more often than in American poems: the quality, that is, of releasing from objects the emotional force they hold in quiet.”

He ends by dissecting his own poem, “To an Adolescent Weeping Willow.” We used to hear this a lot in writing workshops:

“…poems are not about what one already knows so much as they are about what one didn’t know one knew.”

The Essay Project: Subject Matter and Intellectualist Poetry

October 23, 2020 / Big Bang Poetry

This week's essays are by Mark Van Doren. My stapled packet contains two essays with the handwritten date of 1942. They're collected in a book called The Private Reader: Selected Articles & Reviews (1968).

"Poetry and Subject Matter" is an argument against pure experimental abstraction in Modernism.

"Save for the esoteric and the insane, no one who is recent years has defended modern art by insisting that all art be free from subject matter has ever been quite comfortable with doing so. For art needs subject matter as much as it needs form, and only a madman will continue to deny this. Indeed it cannot have form without subject matter; thought it can have technique, a smaller thing that survives catastrophes easily, a kit of tools that turns up, rusty but still recognizable, under the ruins of any civilization. It is the tools of poetry rather than its shape and meaning with which criticism has largely been concerned since poetry in its modern phase began to need defending: since, that it to say, it began to lose its audience.”

If we sends ourselves back to 1942 we can understand why conversations about subject matter might be fresh. MVD might have been dismayed to see how far those impulses went headlong into the 21st century.

“There is something beyond the parts, a formed life which in poetry at any rate is never born without benefit of subject matter. The difficulty of modern poetry is to be explained not by the presence in it of techniques which further study will make us love by by the absence in it of subject matter.”

This was a lost cause in 1942. I think we can see how it makes more sense in 2020. Forsaking subject turned even more narcissistic than confessionalism somehow. Eradicating even the self.

MVD admits that Wordsworth (“still the classic of modernity”) struggled to find a subject for "The Prelude" after many years of waiting for one. But Wordsworth's successors “have been forced back upon themselves in search for something to say"…and "even the subject of self” is something one “bravely exploits” but in it we only hear a “tone of complaint….of irony.”

MVD suggests that “poetry has become impossible because the world no longer supplies [the poet] with things to love.” He invokes “The Waste Land” … part of contemporary poetry with nothing to say. Writers lack a “faith in theme” like war, love, justice, God.

“The subject has been tarnished beyond any tolerable point: and once more it has ceased to reveal its variety….uniformly disillusioned and abstract.”

Disillusionment and abstraction…that was pretty much what modernism was about. To complain about this was to miss the point. Or state the obvious. But he understands our pain: “the industrial revolution, machinery, the middle class, too much sanitation, too little leisure, the credit system, standardization, total wars, frontier psychologies,…the hideousness about him.”

Imagine complaining about middle class leisure today, machinery, washing machines. We’re all leisure and embrace of technology today. He's be horrified. We’ve sold out our middle class in a race to the Walmart price and a house full of machinery crap.

He asks, “Was the world ever beautiful…is any actual world the prime material of poetry?” Perfection “was never here, and it will never be here, and the poet should know this better than anybody. But the typical modern poet, having sold himself to the world, knows only that he has been deceived.”

These messages must have been harshly unsuited to the poets of his time. Or the poets of the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s.

As we're dissembling into chaos and social media, our complaints about the foibles of language seem trite and privileged. MVD is absolutely right when he said,

“The world is all that it is, and there is an infinite number of things to say about it.”

The second essay is called "Achievements of intellectualist poetry" and here he takes on modernist's "difficult poems."

“I shall maintain that Intellectualist poetry has forced us to think exhaustively about the art which it serves—about the elements of this art, I mean, and about its history—and that as a result we have become an audience which for better or worse is committed to the complex poem”

He describes these complex poems as: “skeletons rather than as figures in the flesh," "diagrams of the nervous system, hideous with a tracery of vermilion and purple lines," and "Studies in anatomy, confusing in the way that diagrams are confusing…too many joints exposed."

There are many problems, he says. One, our age is eclectic, we read and know too much, “every style is available to us.”

Second: “we believe in too many things, not that we believe in nothing”…“we are meaninglessly free to choose. Neither orthodoxy nor heresy is possible in a situation which bestows upon all truths an equal and therefore minimum value. So the poet must make what stir he cam among the small, dry bones of thought, rattling them fantastically or arranging them in patterns which at best can only startle us by the oddness with which familiar notions have been juxtaposed.”

Sound familiar?

Third, society is to blame, poverty, war, spirits strangled in an evil and ugly world. [Man] has “a fierce desire to escape the very data of existence. Objects, customs, things: he distrusts them all."

Sound familiar?

The Essay Project: War Writing (It’s Closer to Home Than You Think)

October 14, 2020 / Big Bang Poetry

The essay I dug up for this week is definitely from the Sarah Lawrence essay class because Lamont and Annie actually put their names on the first page, which is nice, because then I can remember them. They found a Jan/Feb 1996 article in The American Poetry Review by Christopher Merrill about poets and the war in Sarajevo, “Everybody Was Innocent: On Writing and War.”

Aside from this essay, we can all sense we’re living through unprecedented times right now, relatives against relatives, old friends against old friends, teams against teams. I watched The Social Dilemma last weekend on Netflix and fears are mounting regarding civil wars in most established democracies around the world right now. This is no longer a far-fetched idea. And it seems social media has done a lot of the work to create a monstrous dystopian reality for all of us.

As writers we all may soon be called upon to become war writers right inside of our own poems about place. This will become the same project.

When I read news reports of Sarajevo back in the 1990s, I remember feeling very moved and very removed. So reading this essay again gave me both a flashback on that feeling and an entirely new perspective.

In this article, Christopher Merrill visits Sarajevo and interviews an ‘embedded’ poet there. Which reminded me, I subscribed to APR for a few years and never read a single article like this in the journal, only academic reviews and landscapes. I wish APR had been as hard-hitting when I subscribed.

The article talks about the special issues around writing about war, such as:

“I want to explore some of the ways in which writers can approach a subject extensively covered by the media: when television cameras shape our perception of a tragedy like Bosnia, how can writers respond to it without, as Sarajevans say of some visitors to their city, ‘going on safari’ – shopping for material, that is, like tourists?”

We can easily replace the idea of television with cable news and social media.

1996 was a year of commemorations, Merrill stated: the liberation of Nazi concentration camps, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, V-J Day, the shootings at Kent State, the fall of Saigon…

"it is important to remember that more than fifty wars are now taking place around the world. The Cold War is over, and we are deep into the Cold Peace.”

Merrill talks about how in Sarajevo the war script was flipped, how in typical wars, the majority of the casualties were soldiers. But in Bosnia, the majority of deaths were civilian. He talks about the “sense of ambiguity integral to the talks of writing about war. Nothing is as it seems…despite what pundits and politicians would have us believe.”

He quotes Vietnam writer Tim O’Brien:

“In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of the truth itself, and therefor it’s safe to say that in a true war story nothing is every absolutely true.”

He talks about the “enormous power of television” and how “CNN has the power to shape events” and again for us it's the cripplingly awesome power of social media and the Internet.

The article quotes Greek poet, Odysseas Elytis, translated by Olga Broumas and T. Begley, who says that during World War II,

“An entire contemporary literature made the mistake of competing with events and succumbing to horror instead of balancing it, as it should have done”

in contrast with the example of Henri Matisse who:

'‘in the years of Buchenwald and Auschwitz…painted the juiciest, rawist, most enchanting flowers and fruits every made, as if the miracle of life itself discovered it could compress itself inside them forever.”

This reminded me of the immense and moving humanity to be found in Georges Perec’s novel Life A Users Manual. Merrill says,

“This is, of course, no small task—even in peacetime. And those who rise to the occasion in war are truly heroes of the literary imagination.”

He considers Bosnian poet Goran Simic one such hero, “discovering meaning in this tragedy.” He also quotes Ferida Durakovic,

“Before the war I didn’t really like Goran’s poetry. It was too hermetic to me. But now it’s so clear and direct. Now he only writes about what’s important.”

Merrill says what interests him is how Simic “looks at the crevice between what the media finds and reality itself.” Merrill talks about Sarajevan humor “at its most biting with a profound moral vision….” and this most haunting warning by journalist Dizdarvic,

‘the victory of evil continues on unabated—the powerlessness of good, the triumph of chaos over order, the verification of defeat in the match between humanity and the bestial goes on…that Sarajevo’s story is not unique—many other towns like it lie along the road of the madmen who have ruined it. As a Sarajevan who has seen and lived through these events, I am compelled to broadcast a warning: there are sick people in the world who now understand that they are dealing with a public that, when it comes to international politics, is egotistical, incompetent, and unrealistic. We are witnessing a renascence of Nazism and Fascism, and now one is willing to call it to a halt. We are witnessing the abolition of all recognized human values.”

That was 1996.

“This insight,” Merrill says, “is one reason why the War Congress closed its session with Ferida Durakovic reading a declaration asserting that ‘the writer exists to face evil.’” Merrill says, “Televised images of war are revolting, but we grow used to them. The writer’s task is to change that.”

Merrill talks about Tobias Wolff’s memoir, In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of the Lost War,

”Wolff went to see at eighteen dreaming of Melville, and it may be said that he went to war to act out something from Hemingway. A writer’s education depends upon the stripping away of illusions about the world—and the self. There is no better place to do that than in a war, where you quickly come up against your own cowardice.”

Merrill ends with a comparison of the witnesses versus the watchers:

“The difference between witnessing and watching is a function of the imagination. Witnessing comes from the Old English for to know; watching is related to waking as from sleep. First we watch and then, if our imaginations are sufficiently engaged, we witness. What I wish for is to make witnesses of us, not just watchers, because in the Age of Television [the Internet] no one is innocent.”

We are at the precipice, if not in the midst, of a civil war, a global civil war and also a very local civil war. It is here. How will we write about it?

The Essay Project: The Music of the Poem

September 22, 2020 / Big Bang Poetry

Not all the essays in my stack are from my essay class. This one was given to me by a classmate named Teresa and her note says “Mary: Essay on Music from Teresa.” This essay, "What Do I Like?" by Theodore Roethke is from Conversation on the Craft of Poetry, edited by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren (1961).

Teresa had been talking to me about the rhythm in my free verse poems and this is an essay all about rhythm and music in lines, the power of meter even in free verse, which Roethke calls “a denial in terms…the ghost of some other form, often blank verse.”

Roethke takes apart his favorite stanzas by these poets (some listed only by last name, others by full names): Auden, Samuel Johnson, himself, George Peck, Elinor Wylie, (Louise) Bogan, Charlotte Mew, Donne, W.H. Davies, Blake, Janet Lewis, Robert Frost, Stevens, Ransom, Whitman, Lawrence, Christopher Smart, and Robert Lowell.

Roethke talks about iambs, sprung lines, base line, alliteration, logic, feminine endings and velocity, spondees, propulsion, repetition, psychological pacing, tone, stress, the “bounding line” or the nervousness in a line, the tension, the energy, the psychic energy, rhetorical devices, enumeration, successive shortening of line length, line length variation, modulation, the natural pause, and the breath unit.

Here are some of the most interesting quotes:

“To question and to affirm, I suppose are among the supreme duties of a poet.”

“We must keep in mind that rhythm is the entire movement, the flow, the recurrence of stress and unstress that is related to the rhythms of the blood, the rhythms of nature. It involves certainly stress, time, pitch, the texture of the words, the total meaning of the poem.”

“We all know that poetry is shot through with appeals to the unconscious, to the fears and desires that go far back into our childhood, into the imagination of the race… [which is why] "some words….are drenched with human association…”

“We must realize, I think, that the writer in freer forms must have an even greater fidelity to his subject matter than the poet who has the support of form. He must keep his eye on the object, and his rhythm must move as a mind moves, must be imaginatively right, or he is lost.”

The Essay Project: More About What Poetry Should Be

August 27, 2020 / Big Bang Poetry

The image to the left is a hilarious critique of poetry by a 5th grader. Read more about it on DailyDot.

So I’ve finally come to the essays my assigned-partner (who I can’t even remember) and I picked for our essay week when it was our turn. Full disclosure, they were terrible. I had not a clue where to find poetry essays, was completely turned-off by the Sarah Lawrence library (and hated going there) and my partner had no interest in researching anything or doing any kind of group work (you know who you are). And so we were left with a few bad short pieced I found. Looking back, I disappoint myself.

"The Problem with Poetry" I brought to Sarah Lawrence as a clipping from something published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch years earlier. I have no clue where we found the Rainer Maria Rilke quote. I was reading "Letters to a Young Poet" but maybe my partner found it. Clearly I was the one who photocopied it because I have a piece of paper taped to it blocking out the parts we didn’t want to photocopy.

"The Problem with Poetry" was an op ed by journalist David Awbrey. It was republished across the country at the time. This essay class was really not the best audience for this editorial. I find myself often simultaneously enthralled and mortified as I look back on my time at Sarah Lawrence, all the times I was a completely clueless and an unintentional shit-starter. I wasn’t brave enough to have been half as annoying as I undoubtedly was as I was trying to form and express my identity as a writer who knew nothing from nothing.

In any case, this article takes poets to task for many things:

Awbrey critiques popular poets of the day for dismissing the most popular of the poets, like Maya Angelou who “has committed the ultimate sin…she has become popular with the American masses.” Today you can substitute Billy Collins and hear the same dismissals in workshops across the land.
Awbrey critiques poets for dismissing the most popular poets of yesterday too. The hit list includes John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Walt Whitman (actually not him, we did study and love Whitman in college), Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay. He doesn’t even mention Sara Teasdale. But these poets simply didn’t exist as far as my graduate writing program was concerned. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I don’t really know. College students should have to deal with the difficult, experimental and groundbreaking aspects of their topics. How many science students deal with strictly popular science?
It’s not the exclusion that I found problematic. It was the attitude of dismissal for popular things.
Awbrey takes academics to task. I’m sure my teacher was thrilled to read stuff like this: “Malcolm Cowley blamed the decline of popular interest in poetry on the movement of many poets and other intellectuals to the universities. Cowley’s point was put best by poet Randall Jarrell: ‘The gods who had taken away the poet’s audience had given him students.’”
I vaguely remember the reaction from the class. They all felt this was smug anti-intellectualism. And there is a little of that being Awbrey is an op-ed writer at a newspaper. Awbrey admits he’s a journalist who “simply [doesn’t] have the time or insights for the kind of creative work that can reshape human awareness and extend the boundaries of imagination. That type of work comes from great poets and novelists.”

Agreed. That’s work for a writer’s writer. Not a reader’s writer. So what’s the problem here?

He goes on to say,

“Unlike some great writers of the past — Dickens, Zola, Melville — many of today's writers have little understanding of how most people live and work. Where aspiring writers once labored on newspapers or in gritty real-world jobs, today's young novelists are more likely enrolled in a college creative-writing program. There, rather than rub their noses in the raw material of life, young writers produce self-pitying drivel on the tragic struggles of assistant professors of English or pick in their subconscious at the scabs of abuse, despair and other wounds caused by their own tiresome personalities.”

Ouch! That’s my classmates he’s talking about. Did I read this thing again before bringing it in?? No wonder I wasn't making friends and influencing people!

“For many of them the foremost issues are whether they get academic tenure or funding from the National Endowment for the Arts….so much current literature is written in an obscure language that is virtually incomprehensible to the average college-educated reader…jargon-ridden and code-laden…read by virtually no one beyond a narrow range of literary cult-followers.”

Here is bit of a weird part about the written message of God:

“Unique among world societies, Western civilization is a culture of the word. The Judeo-Christian tradition is based largely on the written message of God. American democracy is based on a clearly expressed legal system. In Western history, the printed word has been the primary agent of cultural change….It's amazing that at a time of wrenching social upheaval so few writers have anything to say that doesn't center on themselves and their inner lives. A look at a stack of recently published novels or the book sections of magazines and newspapers will turn up few purposeful guides to life in the late 20th century.”

Is he advocating political writing? That would be interesting considering Modernism and Post-Modernism's complete success in eradicating 1930s feminist and political (communist and socialist) writing from the earth, starting during the red scare and continuing through….like yesterday. Or is he only looking for life-guidance in modern art?

“After all, Ms. Angelou talks about rocks, rivers and trees — and even Washington politicians understand what she means.”

I’m always torn between intellectualism and popular culture. Both sides are so adamant in their ideologies. I try to bridge the gaps between them and just end up feeling depressed. So little understanding flows in both directions. It’s part of our narcissism culture. We’re so self-obsessed, we lack the muscle to even consider other points of view.

The second little essay was this: “[For the Sake of a Single Poem]” by Rainer Maria Rilke and I like this one, understandable, better than I did back them. This is about writing yourself too soon.

What young person can resist writing too soon, though? But it speaks back to my earlier cluelessness, a cluelessness that is essentially evidence for his point. Here it is in its entirety:

“…Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough) – they are experiences.

For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn’t pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else -); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along high overhead and went flying with all the stars, – and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that.

You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return.

For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves – only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.”

Having chosen this piece now seems like an ironic little missive, me chiding my current self with a WTF from the past.